Solved: PHP Imagick ‘unable to open image’ PDF
October 29th, 2015
Warning: This post is 8 years old. Some of this information may be out of date.
I've recently stumbled across an issue where PHP Imagick can't open a PDF file despite the file being there and readable. This is using Mac OSX El Capitan with Homebrewed PHP5, Imagemagick, Ghostscript and the PHP55-imagick module. After a bit of searching I found the fix.
The following code was failing:
$file = 'test.pdf';
$im = new Imagick($file);
This was throwing the following error:
Fatal error: Uncaught Exception 'ImagickException' with message 'unable to open image 'test.pdf': No such file or directory
After a bit of searching I was able to determine that Imagemagick was attempting to use Ghostscript's gs
binary, which is found in /usr/local/bin
. After checking the Apache variables in the output from <?php phpinfo(); ?>
I found that this directory wasn't in Apache's $PATH
variable.
I then looked around in /etc/apache2
but couldn't find anywhere to set this. After a bit of searching I found a link on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6833939/path-environment-variable-for-apache2-on-mac) explaining that the PATH variable is set in the OSX Apache startup plist
file, located at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist
.
The solution is to add a node to the file adding the whole PATH environment variable. Open the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist
file and add the path
node and value:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<true/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>org.apache.httpd</string>
<key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
<dict>
<key>XPC_SERVICES_UNAVAILABLE</key>
<string>1</string>
<key>PATH</key>
<string>/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin</string>
</dict>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/sbin/httpd</string>
<string>-D</string>
<string>FOREGROUND</string>
</array>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>
</dict>
</plist>
Save, restart apache with sudo apachectl restart
and the problem should be solved.
I hope this helps someone else.